Distributed Cooperative Framework for Multiple UAVs Safety: A Capability-Triggered Mechanism

This article develops a safety-driven distributed cooperative framework (SDDCF) for multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) subject to actuator faults in the application of emergency search-and-rescue mission. A capability-triggered decision mechanism is proposed to conquer the challenging situation that the system redundancy cannot satisfy the requirement of fault-tolerant control. By quantitatively analyzing the capability of UAV, a safety threshold is provided, which can be updated adaptively in the light of performance requirement and real-time system capability estimated by a fixed-time fault observer. When the safety threshold is violated, the active performance degradation of the faulty UAVs and communication topology reconfiguration of the multiple UAVs are performed. By virtue of the SDDCF with capability-triggered mechanism, the safety of multiple UAVs system suffering from severe actuator faults is ensured for mission completion. The efficacy of the presented framework is demonstrated by a proof-of-concept emergency search-and-rescue mission in real-world flight experiments. Note to Practitioners—The proposed SDDCF is devoted to reduce the safety risk of multiple UAVs with severe actuator faults in emergency missions, where the mobility and reliability must be balanced carefully. Compared with the existing fault-tolerant control schemes, the SDDCF can ensure the safety even if the actuator faults exceed the system redundancy in a specific mission. Moreover, the practicability of the SDDCF, which can be extended to diverse task scenarios, has been verified in real-world flight experiments. In the future, the abilities of cooperative perception and risk avoidance should be improved to further enhance the safety of multiple UAVs in uncertain environments.